Members Ask Former Ally To Step Down, Violent tryst sunders Sausalito school board - April, 16 1999 San Francisco Chronicle -By Peter Fimrite

Members Ask Former Ally To Step Down
Violent tryst sunders Sausalito school board
Peter Fimrite, Chronicle Staff Writer

Friday, April 16, 1999

(04-16) 04:00 PDT SAUSALITO -- Three Sausalito School District trustees turned publicly on one of their colleagues last night, urging her to resign on the eve of her incarceration for a sexual tryst that turned violent.

The request that Trustee Cathomas Starbird step down appears to have undermined efforts to draw blacks and whites together in the educationally troubled elementary school district.

Starbird is an African American who lives in predominantly black Marin City, and the three trustees who called for her resignation are Caucasian and live in predominantly white Sausalito.

Starbird faces a jail term after admitting she assaulted another woman last year during a kinky escapade involving Starbird's husband.

Trustees Judith Johnson, Bill Hudson and Jane Colton, all former allies of Starbird's on a school reform coalition that won election, demanded that their onetime friend step down immediately.

``Like it or not, Cathomas, because of your position as an elected representative, you are more of a role model than (basketball star) Charles Barkley, even if neither of you is willing to shoulder that responsibility,'' said Hudson. ``Cathomas, you are the lighting rod in this district and there is nothing you can do to change that.

. . . I ask for your prompt resignation.''

Trustees Johnson and Colton agreed, issuing their own forcefully worded statements for Starbird's resignation.

But Starbird flatly rejected those requests.

``Board meetings are a place to discuss board business,'' she said. ``My term is not up until December 2000 and I'm not resigning.''

Starbird was accused of punching, kicking and biting another woman on April 25, 1998, after the woman tried to back out of a sexual threesome with Starbird and her husband.

Starbird pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault on November 30 and is scheduled to begin serving jail time today. She has a choice of serving 15 days in jail and the rest of her 90-day sentence wearing an electronic bracelet, or serving the whole time in jail.

After her conviction, she said she assaulted the woman after catching her in bed with her husband.

In refusing to give up her seat on the school board, Starbird has insisted that her private indiscretions, no matter how public they have become, will not affect her ability to improve the schools.

``I did not go into this solely to be a role model,'' she said. ``I went into it to improve the schools and create alternatives for the children.''

Starbird has apologized for her ``mistake,'' but said her seat is not up for negotiation. She and her husband have separated since the incident.

Residents of Marin City have rallied to her side, accusing Johnson, Hudson and Colton and the many Sausalito parents who support them of turning their backs on minority children in their zeal to persecute a black woman.

``It's just racism,'' declared Royce McLemore, the executive director of the community group Women Helping All People. ``They're doing it because she is a black woman and (the board's) image is already tarnished. They are trying to lure rich white people from Sausalito back to the school district by any means necessary.''

Prosecutors and others close to the investigation do not believe Starbird's recent claims that she walked in on an affair. Her lawyer, Samuel Knudsen, did not dispute the essence of the victim's account in court documents, except to say that the attack occurred when the victim refused to leave when Cathomas told her to get out.

The fury caused by the bedroom brawl is an example of how quickly the simmering racial cauldron that defines the relationship between the neighboring communities can hit the boiling point.

The losers in this adults-only imbroglio are the mostly black children of the Sausalito School District. Although the board is made up of reform coalition candidates, their work is jeopardized by the dispute over Starbird.

The crux of the issue, according to those who want her out, is that the conviction distracts from their work and ruins the credibility of the board, especially since Starbird campaigned on a platform of reducing violence.

``How can she sit on this board and enter discussions about discipline problems when this is something in her background?'' Hudson said. ``When you go to the schools and see kids with a newspaper reading about this, you bet it's affecting what's going on in the classrooms. When the children see that a top person in the school district is not willing to shoulder the responsibility for her actions, it unwinds everything we are trying to do.''

What infuriates Hudson, Colton and Johnson even more is Starbird's apparent efforts to rally support for herself and help drive what they say is ``the stake of racial mistrust.''

``To pull the race card out is really hitting below the belt,'' Johnson said. ``This doesn't have anything to do with race, just like it didn't have anything to do with race when we were running together. I'm personally sick to my stomach.''

The only other black trustee, board President Shirley Thornton, has steered clear of the issue, saying her job is to improve education, not judge the other board members.

In making their sentencing recommendation earlier this month, the county parole board cited an incident in 1995, when Starbird stabbed her husband with a kitchen knife during a fight at their home.

The district has been integrated since the 1960s, when busing started between Sausalito, then a funky artists' community, and Marin City, an enclave of 3,000 people living mostly in public housing.

The racial mix, however, began to change rapidly in 1990 when military housing at Forts Baker, Barry and Cronkite started closing, reducing white enrollment in the district's two schools, Bayside/Martin Luther King elementary and Northbay Alternative.

White parents from Sausalito began pulling their children out of the public schools and busing them to private schools elsewhere. In 1989, 51 percent of Sausalito School District students were white. Enrollment subsequently dropped from 387 to 248, leaving a predominantly African American student population from Marin City.

The result is a racial, economic and cultural divide that has ignited the passions of parents, educators, social workers and black and white residents throughout the region.

Adding fuel to the conflagration is the fact that the district's students have the lowest test scores in Marin County despite per-student spending that is nearly three times the statewide average.

A grand jury report in 1997 pilloried the district for leaving students without even basic knowledge. One of the worst problems, it said, was violence and the fact that teachers ``actually fear turning their backs on students.''